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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Phenomenal news.

I’m hoping competition drives prices down. Remarkable 2 looks neat but so expensive. Now there’s choice.

I've been using a Onyx Boox Note 3 for a couple years now (I previously had a Remarkable 1 but it didn't stick for me) - it has Android 10 (w/ Google Play support) and even an SDK for responsive writing for 3rd party apps. It's been great for taking notes, and adequate for reading books and papers (although even a single color for highlighting would be a huge improvement).

Note, that Onyx is notorious for violating the GPL (it doesn't release kernel sources), while reMarkable is not only compliant, but much more hacker friendly in general: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

But there are also other companies/products Boyue Likebook, Ratta Supernote, Quirklogic Papyr, Fujitsu Quaderno that compete in the e-ink notepad space as well. I'm keeping an eye on the Bigme Carve Color personally, which basically has all the hardware specs you'd want and color (Kaleido 2) to boot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydo5FtSt_qQ

For those looking at color, it might be worth waiting a few months to see if 1) if the Reinkstone R1 is actually vaporware or not (it has an alternative DES that looks like it provides better looking color, but is being developed by a questionable Chinese company that's been best by delays) and if eInk's Kaleido 3 is a significant improvement.

For those interested in the relatively niche world of e-ink devices, I highly recommend MyDeepGuide as a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/c/MyDeepGuide/videos

Which one has the best DPI?

Almost all of them use the same E Ink displays and have the same resolution/density. The newest ones use the Carta 1200 panel which improves response/updates, not resolution. Here's a reasonable chart of pixel density: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink#Comparison_of_E_Ink_disp...

Sony

Soon: https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/

Also I want to recommend this one: Onyx Boox Nova3 Not so wallet gardened, and with a modern Android (so you could use google maps, openstreet maps or whatever among many other things)

> Soon: https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/

Eagerly waiting for it to become stable enough, and possibly the announcement of a bigger screen version. I'm not a mole, although I wear glasses, but books with diagrams and schematics need bigger screens not to be forced to zoom back and forth. I would also like a cheaper and bigger reader-only version, that is with no hardware/software to take notes, reduced eMMC storage in favor of external uSD cards, and good network integration supporting both NFS and CIFS. It would be nice for users who either bring their books on a uSD card, or would use the reader in a lab where most documentation files are already shared via local WiFi network.

As soon as that is able to reliably show PDFs and ePUBs with decent battery life, I'll probably get one. My phone is too small for some reading content, and the remarkable tablets lack a frontlight.

I hadn't see this. I've got a Boox Nova3, and though I like it in theory, the UX isn't great. That's the reason I'd consider the Huawei.

But also, how long until Amazon makes a kindle that lets me take notes both in the book I'm reading, but also as just a blank notebook....please please...

I’d be keen, except I have no time to tinker. As far as I can tell, PinePhones are still very much DIY, might work etc.

>Remarkable 2 looks neat but so expensive. Now there’s choice.

R2 is $399, judging from the EUR retail price of €499 inc. VAT this will likely retail at $499 in US.

It is not cheaper than R2.

The prices reMarkable advertise are deceptive to the point where I reckon they’re probably illegal under at least Australian advertising law: that price doesn’t include a marker, which is almost essential to the deliberately expressed purpose of the device; so add on another 20%. Most people will also want some kind of cover, which is another 20% for the cheapest reMarkable sells.

You’ve got to be careful about this when comparing prices of different products, because they include different things. It sounds like Huawei’s will include a stylus and cover for that price, which does make it a little cheaper than reMarkable’s equivalent bundle.

Also, if you want basic features like cloud sync and handwriting conversion, you have to sign up for the $8/mo subscription.

Which is why hell will freeze over before I purchase a reMarkable.

Incidentally, the free plan offers something called "50-day sync", which is described like this:

"Without a subscription, you can still use the cloud to store and sync your notes. However, files will stop syncing to the mobile and desktop apps if they haven’t been opened in the last 50 days. They’ll still be automatically stored on your paper tablet."

Just to be clear: This is a feature designed for the marketing department, not for users.

The marketing people get to say that "we offer free cloud sync", while reducing users' trust in the cloud sync significantly enough that they feel obliged to sign up for the paid subscription.

It's infuriating.

> if you want basic features like cloud sync and handwriting conversion, you have to sign up for the $8/mo subscription.

You don't "have to" for cloud sync. Remarkable is a fairly open platform and there is a vibrant open source community surrounding it.

You can use a tool like the Remote Connection Utility [0], with support for $12pa. "RCU ensures the user's data is never out of their control, completely unshackled from the manufacturer's proprietary cloud.". There are other tools.

I can't speak to handwriting conversion as I don't use it, but I suspect they don't have any secret sauce and that any 3rd party recognition app can deal with the content if provided in a standard format. I sure wouldn't be wanting boox or Huawei clouds to scan my raw text.

[0] http://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

I wouldn’t describe reMarkable as a fairly open platform. The one thing they got right was granting SSH root access as a way of complying with GPL and similar licenses, but that’s honestly the extent of its openness from their side, and they’ve rebuffed any appeals from the community that supported them so strongly early on to be in any way more open. Their software is all closed source, and designed in a self-contained way that is fairly robustly non-extensible. Their on-device rendering is superb, but their off-device rendering (used in their desktop software, for example) is mediocre for most writing and outright bad for anything resembling art. (This was the case last time I tried, over a year ago, and I get the impression that it’s still the case—they do something like turning their variable-width strokes into filled paths, then unioning them (to flatten self-intersection) and doing aggressive path simplification. I’m perplexed that they do it this way since it produces an obviously bad rendering on self-intersecting paths, which occur a lot in writing: path simplification needs to be done before unioning, not after.)

Sure, quite a few other people have written software for it or peripheral to it, but it’s all based on reverse engineering, since you’ve got things like xochitl (the UI software that runs on the tablet) being written in Qt with QML so that you can get a certain degree of binary patching (see ddvk-hacks, which customises the UI a fair bit), and their file formats are all sufficiently simple where it matters (some JSON, some plain text, and the stroke data being a painfully unoptimised binary-packed data scheme) that people can approximate most of it pretty well. But I’ve been feeling a growing sense of dissatisfaction in the community on the openness side of things. Many people chose to go with reMarkable because of this ostensible openness and the idea that things would improve, but at least some of it is a mirage, and attempts at extending on-device functionality are decidedly for power-users only who are willing to tolerate various inconveniences.

RCU is… eh. Tolerable. A good bit of work, but weaker than something first-party, mostly because of how it’s built on reverse-engineering and fitting around the whims of the reMarkable team, and how their software is architected. Its syncing is mildly fragile, and I’ve steadily become convinced that its entire approach of doing per-document tarballs containing the files pertaining to that document, rather than just mirroring the device’s ~/.local/share/remarkable/xochitl (which is flat) was misguided, a mistake as a primary approach (use something like that for interchange, sure, but for the typical task of syncing it’s very not good). Its rendering is the best I’ve found among open-source renderers, but it’s still very inaccurate for anything even vaguely arty. I’ve written my own SVG rendering pipeline (which currently means no textures or variable opacities, but only variable stroke widths—and on the point of variable stroke widths I’ve done better than any before me by a considerable margin) that I haven’t yet released, but thinking things through I’ve decided I’m actually not interested in continuing to work in and around a closed tool, so I don’t think I’ll bother going on to a more pixel-perfect bitmap renderer as I had originally planned; I’m more interested in the potential of starting from scratch in a proper open software ecosystem where you can actually add useful functionality to the software, rather than just eating the crumbs that drop from the master’s table. In the mean time, `rsync --archive --verbose --compress --delete $REMARKABLE_HOST:.local/share/remarkable/xochitl/ ~/reMarkable/data/` is excellent for sync.

I look forward to the PineNote getting further. A little way down the line, I’ll be seriously considering getting one and creating good long-form writing and drawing software optimised for it.

Cloud sync is also available by default without a subscription, just limited to files that were modified in the past 60 days.

Read my above viewpoints as a UX professional about the 50 day sync "feature".

> Also, if you want basic features like cloud sync and handwriting conversion, you have to sign up for the $8/mo subscription.

> Which is why hell will freeze over before I purchase a reMarkable.

Maker of capital intensive hardware seeks revenue streams to bolster development and hire more engineers.

Chinese MANGA equivalent enters the chat with their own hardware financed from other business units and potentially subsidized.

This is why we can't have nice things.

We complain until the giants eat the market. Wait until you see the lock in they have in store. You won't be able to run arbitrary executables or hack on their devices like you can the reMarkable.

Pay more for products from small companies.

> Maker of capital intensive hardware seeks revenue streams to bolster development and hire more engineers.

If China wasn't in this conversation, the above would be criticized as an example of greedy MBAs nickel and diming the consumer.

The capability to do file sync for free has existed on computing devices for ages, yet somehow this is an area where rent-seeking is acceptable? At least Chinese vendors like Onyx use Android under the hood, so setting up Nextcloud, Dropbox or Syncthing Fork can be done in a matter of minutes, without any ridiculous subscription fees.

>> Chinese MANGA equivalent enters the chat with their own hardware financed from other business units and potentially subsidized.

> If China wasn't in this conversation [...]

Substitute "China" for "Amazon" and my point still stands.

> [...], the above would be criticized as an example of greedy MBAs nickel and diming the consumer.

That's exactly my point though. We're too critical of small businesses with expensive products. It's unsustainable and unrewarding for small biz to innovate in hardware or expensive ventures that can easily be cloned and ripped off by big businesses that have fantastically mature revenue streams at scale.

I'll take my point further. Consumer behavior won't change and there is no solution in trying to shore up customer empathy. Instead, top down policy is the solution. Patents need to be given asymmetric teeth in order to fend off the bloodthirsty giants. That way we continue to allocate capital to innovation rather than the act of subsidized carbon copying.

A recent success case is Sonos in their patent litigation against Google's blatant copying of their multi-room audio product.

(Granted, we also need to tamp down on no-product patent trolling. Those people are nothing more than fancy thieves wearing suits.)

It's an electronic notepad. I'm not paying a monthly subscription for what should be basic features and can be performed on-device. Sorry.

Enterprise features like integration with enterprise software, SSO, MFA etc? Totally different, and happy to pay.

RM2 is extremely useful without any subscription.

You can use any standard resistive stylus pen though, which you can get for extremely cheap anywhere (and you need to anyway, since the tips will wear down). The only thing their accessory pen adds is a built-in eraser.

The Remarkable tablet uses a Wacom EMR stylus - I picket up a Remarkable 1 from a recycling container and it worked fine with my Samsung Note 8 (or so?) stylus, at least for pressure. Similarly, the Remarkable stylus works with the Samsung Galaxy S21 and S22 Ultra models.

Wacom clone styluses are a bit more expensive than resistive styluses, but they can be bought for less than 20$.

Ah, thank you for the clarification. I was told by a friend that he just used cheap brand stylus tips for his Remarkable tablet, I may have misremembered that as resistive styluses

There's already been choice in the 10.3" eInk note pad segment, Kobo Elipsa, Fujitsu Quaderno, Boox Note and Note Air, Likebook P10W, Supernote A5X, etc. It's just such a niche thing combined with most of the devices being Asian focused and remarkable heavy online marketing that makes them seem like the only option.

They are still relatively expensive in relation to kindles. I really hope the prices get below $200 one day.

The Kobo Sage is slightly cheaper (in the US) for a comparable product. Still over $200, but not a lot if you get a Sage on sale and buy via Rakuten for an additional rebate.

I've had a Kindle Oasis (the non-ad-supported version) for a couple years. A couple months ago I got a Kobo Sage.

Same in both Oasis and Sage: - Screen quality - Battery life (in my experience; this doesn't match the actual specs of the products though) - "Waterproof"

Differences: Favoring Kobo Sage: - Screen is a bit bigger without a significant penalty in size and weight - Compatible with a pen and has built-in drawing/OCR/note-taking capabilities - Really easy to borrow eBooks from library via OverDrive - Easier to side-load and sync free eBooks - Slightly cheaper (US)

Favoring Kindle Oasis: - Slightly lighter weight and more compact - More responsive buttons (touch screen is same responsiveness) - Amazon's book purchasing and browsing features are a bit easier to use - Amazon selection is better - "Family" sharing - Built-in free cellular wireless data for Amazon downloads and browsing

I'm happy owning both devices. If I had to choose one or the other, then:

eReader only: I'd choose Kobo only because library borrowing is so much easier. If my local library didn't have OverDrive, then I would choose the Kindle + Amazon Unlimited in a heartbeat.

eInk tablet: Kobo, no question. The Kindle is an eReader. Amazon hasn't made any effort to make it anything more. It simply doesn't make sense to me to compare any eInk Kindle to the Kobo, MatePad, ReMarkable, Boox, etc.

My partner likes eInk tablets for note taking and diagramming, not for e-reading. He has both a ReMarkable 2 and a Boox. The ReMarkable is fine, but He much prefers the Boox because it's easier to use without a subscription. But, now that my partner has used my Kobo Sage, he is unsure whether he'd buy a Boox over a Sage. He says it's a very close call and it would probably come down to price.

Whatever Amazon sells you, you're probably paying for it indirectly some other way.

I agree. This is a poor comparison.

A product that's subsidized will always win the price war with one that's not

Well, the difference between Kindle Paperwhite and Oasis is just one inch - but you need to pay twice as much. You could say only the former is subsidized - but wouldn't it be in Amazon's best interest to make reading experience more comfortable?

Its in Amazon's best interest to offer either convenience or lower price, which is what they do at the cost of treating labor poorly and harvesting usage data.

It's comfort and convenience subsidized through suffering

> Its in Amazon's best interest to offer either convenience or lower price, which is what they do

Not necessary. AFAIK, it is very often the case they just force vendors to not offer lower prices elsewhere, or else face non-promotion on Amazon, reducing sales significantly.

Supernote seems to be a popular alternative.

I didn't knew that one, thanks!

Someone else has mentioned the Boox Note Air.

I'm kind of hoping Amazon create one, and use ebook sales to subsidise the hardware cost.

Kobo has a 10.3" reader, it's a bit cheaper than competitors but it's also not as good.

Amazon doesn't really seem to subsidize ereader hardware except maybe in countries where they are "losing" like Canada. Like compare what you get with a Boox Leaf or Boyue P78 for the price of a Kindle Oasis.

My kindle is “ad supported” which I always took as they subsidized it. That being said at least a year ago you can hack it and install ko reader and set the ad directory to read only and you got yourself a darn good Ereader with no ads.

It is or at least was cheaper to buy a Kindle Paperwhite in Canada with no ads than one in the U.S with ads. Even after taxes and conversion. It's really really unusual for an electronic product to be cheaper in Canada than the U.S.

Usually a comparable Kobo or Pocketbook is within spitting distance if not cheaper. The 6.8" Paperwhite somewhat upset the balance as they don't have a direct response to it right now. A Kobo Libra 2 is 90% of what an Oasis is for 2/3rds the cost. And no ads.

Most of the expense on these e-ink tablets comes from the huge cost of that screen, so unless Huawei is willing to subsidize this product and monetize your private data instead, I doubt this will be significantly cheaper than the competition.

Regardless of price though, I'm not willing to out my private data on Huawei devices.

Are there no other companies apart from e-ink?

There is no "other company".

E-ink owns the parents, the fabs and the secret sauce to profitably producing quality e-ink film in good yelds.

Even without the parents, building fabs and the film profitably without their secret sauce would be impossible.

It's kind of like the early days of OLED when Samsung was the only one who could fab the tech profitably.

> E-ink owns the parents, the fabs and the secret sauce to profitably producing quality e-ink film in good yelds.

fabs? Jesus H Christ. Based on just that one sentence, I can guarantee you have 0 experience and 0 direct knowledge of the display industry. Your statement is the equivalent to saying "Microsoft owns the parents (sp), the fabs and the secret sauce to profitably producing quality operating systems in good yelds (sp).

Would be nice if you also had an argument with your statement and not just mockery, to prove me wrong.

> Would be nice if you also had an argument with your statement and not just mockery, to prove me wrong.

So you make a massive unsubstantiated claim and I have to prove you wrong? I see the way your logic works.

Lets see.

You've made the claim that "E-ink owns the parents, the fabs and the secret sauce to profitably producing quality e-ink film in good yelds.".

So let me ask a simple question. Since you say E-ink owns all the fabs, can you show me the location of even one E-ink fab?

Here's a hint for the answer. E-Ink is a fabless company. That may confuse you so lets make it clearer. It means they don't have ANY fabs. In fact, I don't even know of even one electrophoretic material producer who has a fab.

Would you like to try again and provide a more accurate statement that reflects your level of ACTUAL knowledge of the display industry?

Mate, you're going completely off the rails and I'm not sure if you're actively trolling or are misinformed and in denial.

E-ink is a manufacturer of the E-ink pigment particles and the EPD film that's then sold to various display manufacturers where it gets sandwiched between glass, an ITO top electrode and a TFT bottom layer connected to a CoG (chip on glass), basically like any other LCD TFT display but instead of liquid crystal you have the famous patented E-ink pigment.

Those EPD display manufacturers all depend on buying the e-ink film manufactured by E-ink, at their fab in ... drum-roll ... Taiwan (big surprise). None of these EPD display company could make displays by themselves without the film they buy from E-ink.

Just read their website [1] and article [2] before spewing more nonsense

[1] "E Ink manufacturers a number of EPD films, with different attributes depending on application needs"

[1] https://www.eink.com/e-ink-film.html

[2] " As part of E Ink’s manufacturing process, microcapsules of ink coat plastic film. The film is then dried, inspected, rerolled, and sent on for further processing."

[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-e-ink-developed-full-color-epa...

"Those EPD display manufacturers all depend on buying the e-ink film manufactured by E-ink, at their fab in ."

You think a film is manufactured at a fab? Do you even know what a fab is? Did you think a fab was like a manufacturing plant with vats of liquids? Jesus H Christ.

There are other companies now. Plastic Logic and OED are two I know of.

I checked them out and as far as I could tell, both are making displays based on E-ink's film. E-ink is also a major shareholder of Plastic Logic.

As I was saying, E-ink is the only game in town making the film. All the others are making displays based on it.

> both are making displays based on E-ink's film

Jesus H Christ. Sigh... Just have a google again on OED and at least read the first page of their website properly. It is clear to me the level of confidence in your claims corresponds inversely with the level of accuracy of the facts.

You really have no idea what you're talking about. Please read E-ink's website before spreading more disinformation.

You claimed OED buys E-Ink films. Please prove that with some evidence.

Go ahead and google your heart out. You don't work in the display industry which is why you don't know the well known fact that OED is a competitor of E-Ink. They both produce electrophoretic films.

What you said is literally the equivalent of saying Coca Cola buys its secret syrup from Pepsi.

It is so ridiculous. And yet HN is filled with your level of comments on electrophoretics.

Not really. I'm pretty sure e-ink tech is still patented. There are some similar options like DES used in the maybe vaporware Reinkstone.

not to sound cynical but you are willing to draw the line with an american company, say google but not an openly chinese company like huawei. cool.

what about all the chinese people then? why would they want to use a google device over a huawei device?

shouldnt the discussion be about no company being able to harvest data in the first place, then we wouldnt be having this discussion about nationalities of the overlords

For context, I own a Huawei Matebook D and multiple "smart" devices by Apple and Samsung.

I'm hesitant to buy a Huawei device because of issues with support and build quality. My Matebook D is down at the moment due to an issue with the USB-C port, which also supplies power. I've owned many devices at this point that use USB-C, and the Huawei is the only one that has ever failed for this reason. To be fair I can't 100% lay the blame on "poor build quality", as my kids were the primary users and my youngest is hell on cables.

What I can say is that getting parts or support for it seems basically impossible. Understanding that that's because of the US government doesn't make it better. I'm hoping I'll be able to reflow the jack on the motherboard and get it to work again, but if not, I'll end up having to source a pulled motherboard from eBay - there's no other way for me to get parts, and as far as I can tell, no way for me to send it to the manufacturer for repair, even on my dime.

Between Apple, Samsung, and Google...

My experience with Samsung devices tells me that longevity isn't their strong suit. I'll never buy another Samsung TV again, and am very unlikely to buy another Samsung appliance. I might be willing to buy a phone or laptop, but only if there is adequate insurance or a service plan included in the price.

I don't trust Google. I try to keep as much of my data out of their hands as possible. I know that's a losing proposition - both because it may actually be impossible and because I'm not willing or able to completely cut Google services out of my life. I _really_ don't want an Android device if I can help it.

I don't exactly trust Apple, either, but at least it seems like they have a slightly more conservative corporate policy when it comes to sharing the data they've collected on my identity and usage. They're known to push back against "mass" warrants, and I've not seen anything that would lead me to believe that they have or plan to sell those data to a third party. They collect it, archive it, and use it for their own purposes, though. I wouldn't call that "good", but it's better than the alternatives.

You're making a lot of claims about me and about Chinese people, which are not true, based on stuff you made up.

made up what? i am not in the US or china and i already know xiaomi and google is harvesting data and selling ads as a form of extra revenue and they even make that as a selling point (ads help us subsidize cost of product) and other non-sense.

does it matter that now huawei is doing the same? if i, as a user is having no issues with xiaomi or google or facebook harvesting and selling data to the highest bidder, how is huawei any "more" wrong or bad?

It all comes down to the paper like writing feel + latency. Several contenders have been compared to RM2, but RM2 has consistently won out. Curious how this one does.

The A5X from Supernote is now to the point that I personally have the feeling it writes as fast as paper[0].

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Supernote/comments/rkw00t/a5x_chauv...

Choice is good! But while ofc YMMV, IME the ReMarkable2 is priced very reasonably; it immediately became part of my daily workflow and has had big ROI for me.

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